Azerbaijan

Stephen R. Sestanovich, a former ambassador-at-large and special adviser to the secretary of state for newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, says the parliamentary elections set for Monday in Azerbaijan have attracted considerable Western interest, and there is a potential for violence in the streets afterwards if the results are seen to be "grossly manipulated."Many comparisons have been made with what happened in Georgia and Ukraine when public protests overthrew elections that were deemed corrupt, but Sestanovich, who is the Council’s George F. Kennan senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies, says it is possible that, this time, elections might be fairer."The polls do show that President Ilham Aliyev, whose New Azerbaijan Party controls the parliament, has some residual popularity. This is a country with 10 percent average economic growth for the past five or six years, is enjoying an oil boom that is spreading, and it is not clear he has the same popular opprobrium that say, President Leonid Kuchma had in Ukraine at the end of his tenure, or President Eduard Shevardnadze had at the end of his in Georgia," he says. He was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on November 4, 2005.In recent elections in Georgia and Ukraine—both former Soviet republics—the results have been overturned by popular uprisings. Now, there is a parliamentary election due to take place in Azerbaijan on Sunday, another former Soviet republic. Do you foresee a Georgian or Ukrainian outcome there, too?There are some differences and some similarities. Azerbaijan does not have the same kind of well-established, mobilized opposition that you saw in Georgia and Ukraine. But it has a lot more pluralism than you see in some of the Central Asian countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, for example, and the political parties have united as a bloc. There is much more reason to expect a real political process in Azerbaijan if the authorities allow it. There have been some interesting developments here.Can you list them?Well, in the past, the Azerbaijan opposition has been a collection of small, personality-based parties with not much organization, and unable to get along with each other at all. This year, for the first time, there has actually been a united opposition bloc, which is one reason to take this electoral process more seriously than ever before.The three most significant opposition parties, the Popular Front, the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan, and what is known as Mosavat have joined together in a bloc called Azadliq (Freedom). Who is the leader of the bloc?The bloc itself does not have a single leader. The parties have worked together in a way that hasn’t been done before. A second development of interest is the much greater attention that Western governments have paid to this election in advance of the balloting. In the past, there was often a series of disagreements and complaints about the quality of the election, but this time, there has been very insistent discussion at high levels between the Azerbaijani government and Western governments. You had high-level officials visit. You had lots of nongovernmental organization (NGO) interest, and the Azerbaijani government’s response has been to backtrack steadily in its acceptance of some of the procedural norms that we think of as constituting a free and fair election. This includes, for instance, the use of accurate voter lists, voter identification documents, even finger-inking, which the United States put particular pressure on the Azerbaijani government to accept. The Azeris also said they would welcome foreign observers, and have accepted the idea that domestic NGOs with foreign funding could work as observers. Some of this may have come too late in the game to really entitle the Azeris to a favorable verdict by outside observers, but it has given momentum to the opposition.One other thing that is new is the increased media access for the opposition. They actually have a satellite TV channel which has made a dent in what otherwise would have been government domination of the airwaves. They have also established a public television channel which has given more neutral coverage to the political campaign.What are the details of the parliamentary election?This is an election for 125 seats in the parliament. It would not formally require the president to step down, but if there were a very strong showing by the opposition, it could create a new political dynamic in Azerbaijan. If the election is free and fair, what would be the likely result?It is always hard to say of course because the lack of "free and fair" means the opposition operates under a burden. The polls do show that President Ilham Aliyev, whose New Azerbaijan Party controls the parliament, has some residual popularity. This is a country with 10 percent average economic growth for the past five or six years, is enjoying an oil boom that is spreading, and it is not clear he has the same popular opprobrium that say, President Leonid Kuchma had in Ukraine at the end of his tenure, or President Eduard Shevardnadze had at the end of his in Georgia. So, there may be a stronger base of support for Aliyev and his party.After President Aliyev’s election in 2003, there was some violence. Do you expect violence this time?The opposition has said it would fight if the election results are unfair but they have emphasized that the protests will be peaceful. Given the record of sporadic violence, it is impossible to rule out some kind of renewed violence if the elections are seen to be grossly manipulated. The fact that the opposition is united this time probably gives them the opportunity to muster a larger protest in the streets.There has been a lot of pressure by the government to limit the opposition through this campaign, and the record of previous Azeri elections makes it hard to predict a free and fair result. The ruling party holds 108 out of the 125 seats. If the election produces that result again, I think most people will regard it as fraud.Talk about U.S.-Azeri relations. With the oil in that country, how does that play out with the United States?The United States has, for more than a decade, tried to encourage an increase in Azerbaijan’s energy exports, both oil and gas, notably through the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi [Georgia]-Ceyhan [Turkey] pipeline, and in addition, Azerbaijan has been a very eager partner for the United States since 9/11. It has personnel in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The government of Azerbaijan would by any standard be considered very friendly to the United States. On the other hand, the administration wants President Ilham Aliyev to show that he has taken steps forward in respect to institutionalization of democratic practices. That has meant a stream of high-level statements and visitors calling for free and fair elections. The administration has wanted to make clear that it is not advocating a revolution. In fact, Daniel Fried, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, who was in Baku last month, spoke in a lecture of revolution as a "failure," trying to encourage the idea that Azerbaijan has an opportunity to show a model of peaceful evolution. Peaceful evolution will involve mobilization of a strong opposition with a real popular base.What is the status of Rasul Guliyev, who I gather was once a leading opponent of President Heydar Aliyev, the late father of the current president?He was the former speaker of the parliament, and fled Azerbaijan in the mid-1990s, charged with embezzlement of some $117 million, and was subsequently granted political asylum in the United States. This didn’t mean the United States thought he was innocent of those charges, only that he had a legitimate fear of persecution if he were extradited to Azerbaijan. He has a real political base in Azerbaijan. His party, the Democratic Party of Azerbaijan, has remained strong, partly, it is said, through his funding. Recently he tried to return to Azerbaijan to take part in the elections, but was kept out of Azerbaijani air space. He was detained in Ukraine, but Ukrainians have refused to extradite him to Azerbaijan as the government asked just a day or so ago. President Aliyev and President [Viktor] Yushchenko of Ukraine had a phone conversation about this in which Aliyev protested the Ukrainian decision. What is the reaction of the other members of the opposition bloc to Guliyev?I think it is fair to say that the other opposition parties are probably not completely distressed that he was unable to return, but they certainly work with his party and his party strengthens the bloc, no doubt about it.Tell me something about President Aliyev. Had you met him when you were ambassador to the former Soviet republics?I met him a number of times, always in the presence of his father, at a time when he was an official of the state oil company. He had been trained as an airline pilot. He had a reputation for high living and little interest in politics. The superficial impression he made on Westerners at the time was of someone not naturally inclined to politics, very much in his father’s shadow. But his father was determined to have him succeed him, and he organized that transition before his death in 2003. The younger Aliyev had been elevated to be prime minister, and took over as acting president and won a special election that was not marked by "excessive competitiveness."Very diplomatic.One further thing about young Aliyev: Because he doesn’t have a long background in politics, his natural authority within the elite is less than his father’s. There were many people who did not like his father, but everybody acknowledged that he was an exceptionally savvy and effective politician, very smart and capable. Ilham commands less of that respect, although he may in time prove to be a leader with more Western instincts. He speaks English, he had more international exposure, the kinds of hopes that people typically invest in the young offspring of elderly dictators, who have been in the West and have spent time in fast social circles. These are characteristic of the hopes that have been invested in Ilham. It is unlikely he will satisfy all of these hopes, but in some ways, he has already given more ground in allowing an open election than you would have expected his father to do.A bit of history to satisfy my curiosity: In 1992, there was an election for the presidency in the newly independent Azerbaijan, and Abulfaz Elchibey was elected. He was overthrown by Heydar Aliyev?In the first years of Azerbaijan’s independence there was more political turmoil. Elchibey represented the populist movement that ultimately proved unable to govern the country, or win the war with Armenia over [the republic of] Nagorno-Karabakh. The elder Aliyev made a return to power. He had been first secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party in Soviet times. He came as a unifier and ruled from 1994 to his death in 2003. Azerbaijan borders Iran. Does that mean there is a strong religious party or any party with pro-Iranian orientation?No. There is a stronger sense of Azeri national identity than you might expect. There is no very strong religious party in this election. There are some smaller parties that call themselves "Islamic," but they deny they are radical fundamentalist, and it does seem as though the more credible opposition is essentially secular.What is the situation now in Nagorno-Karabakh? Does Armenia control events there?De facto, yes, although the authorities assert they have established their independence as a political entity in their own right. All Azeri political parties take a very strong, hard line on the issue. The elder Aliyev was more interested, and had the political clout, to pursue a compromise settlement. There has been much less movement since Ilham took over. If he tried to reach a settlement, the opposition would definitely leap on this.

This publication is now archived. Nagorno-Karabakh’s recent history One of the former Soviet Union’s most intractable and longstanding conflicts is Nagorno-Karabakh. An enclave the size of Delaware wedged between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh has been a sore spot since 1988, when the region’s legislature passed a resolution to join Armenia. Legally speaking, the republic lies within Azerbaijan’s borders, but the majority of its inhabitants are ethnic Armenians. The region’s attempt at secession was rejected by Azerbaijan and sparked a bout of violence that created hundreds of thousands of refugees. Once the Soviet Unioncollapsed, Nagorno-Karabakh’s legislature decided to declare outright independence. The republic now enjoys a de facto independence, though neither Armenia nor Azerbaijan recognizes the republic’s territorial sovereignty. In 1992, full-scale war between Azerbaijan and Armenia broke out. By the middle of the year, Armenia controlled the bulk of Nagorno-Karabakh and pushed further into Azerbaijani territory to establish the so-called Lachin Corridor, an umbilical cord linking the breakaway republic with Armenia proper. By 1993, Armenian forces had occupied nearly 20 percent of the Azerbaijani territory surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh and expelled hundreds of thousands of ethnic Azeris. That was followed up by a Russia-brokered ceasefire in 1994, which is how the situation has remained more than a decade later. Today, Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding region remain under Armenian control. Nearly one-seventh of Azerbaijan is under Armenian occupation. Around 700,000 Azeri refugees—or just under 10 percent of Azerbaijan’s entire population—remain displaced in the region, in addition to some 235,000 Armenian refugees. All told, 25,000 lives were lost on both sides during the separatist struggle. The conflict’s effects on domestic politics Throughout the 1990s, Nagorno-Karabakh weighed heavily over both countries’ domestic politics. After Azerbaijan was occupied in 1992, Baku’s Communist president, Ayaz Mutalibov, was forced to resign. This paved the way for Abulfaz Elchibey, a nationalist of the Populist Front Party who drew Azerbaijan closer to Turkey but pushed Russian forces out. Elchibey refused to negotiate a settlement over Nagorno-Karabakh, insisting instead on a military victory. On his watch, Azerbaijan lost ground both economically and militarily. In 1993, when Colonel Surat Huseynov, a rebel army commander, overtook Azerbaijan’s second-largest city, Gyandzha, and looked ready to stage a coup in Baku, Elchibey fled to his native Nakhichevan, an enclave of Azerbaijan cut off from the rest of the country, but called on a former Communist boss and fellow native of Nakhichevan, Heydar Aliyev, to defend the capital. Aliyev instead assumed control of the country via a presidential election and made Huseynov his prime minister. In Armenia, national politics are intermixed with that of the Nagorno-Karabakh republic, which technically remains part of Azerbaijan (the international community does not recognize the republic’s claim for independence). Its current president, Robert Kocharian, is a former Communist official and native of the republic, where he served as president from 1994-97. Kocharian, as head of Armenia, has taken a middle-of-the-road approach to the separatist conflict: He has refused calls from the Armenian diaspora to fully incorporate the republic within Armenia, fearing a rebuke from the international community, but he has also proved unwilling to give up Armenia’s—some would say illegal—occupation of the disputed territory. Prospects for peace Since 1994, there have been a number of unsuccessful attempts to broker peace by the so-called Minsk Group, a subset of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) chaired by Russia, the United States, and France. According to the United States Institute for Peace, “ceasefire agreements were routinely broken literally within minutes of their signing.” The more recent rounds of negotiations, called the “Prague Process,” have yielded no breakthroughs either, while groups like the International Crisis Group (ICG) continue to create new ways to end the conflict. ICG’s recent report recommends twenty possible solutions to settling the dispute. There has been muted talk of holding a plebiscite in Nagorno-Karabakh to determine the republic’s final status but the details remain to be determined. One obstacle to peace is the issue of sequencing. All three sides—Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorno-Karabakh—refuse to budge until the others make a concession: Azerbaijan wants Armenia to end its occupation first and withdraw its forces before discussing the republic’s final status; Armenia is seeking a resolution first on the status question before pulling out its forces; Nagorno-Karabakh wants its independence officially recognized prior to all other negotiations. Another obstacle to peace is geopolitics. Many of the international players involved in the negotiations have ulterior motives, experts say. Russia, for example, has no interest in seeing the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh resolved, says Elizabeth Fuller, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty expert on the Caucasus, because some degree of instability enhances Moscow’s hand in the region. Azerbaijan also suspects Russia of being too pro-Armenia; for instance, Russia’s Defense Ministry was caught supplying a large amount of military hardware to Armenia from 1994-96. Azerbaijan also sees France as pro-Armenia, because of the country’s sizable—and influential—Armenian diaspora. Ditto the United States, which also has a powerful Armenian lobby, although in recent years, experts say Washington has begun courting Azerbaijan more because of its geo-strategic position as a partner in the war on terrorism and a global supplier of non-OPEC oil. Finally, Turkey has a large role to play in the conflict. With a long history of poor relations with Armenia over Ankara’s refusal to apologize for the 1915 genocide of some 1.5 million Armenians, Yerevan sees Istanbul as too pro-Azerbaijan.Turkey’s refusal to reopen the Armenian-Turkish border to facilitate Turkish-Armenian trade—requested by a powerful Turkish business lobby interested in Armenian markets—further intensified Yerevan’s suspicions. Overall, time is not onArmenia’s side, given thatAzerbaijan’s economy, due to its surge in oil exports, has outpaced Armenia’s, says Svante Cornell, deputy director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies. “[The Armenians] are realizing they may have to settle and sue for peace,” he says. “The fact is they do occupy this territory.” Because of Azerbaijan’s influx of petrodollars, it will soon be able to double the size of its military, Fuller says. “The question is: How good are [Azerbaijan’s] armed forces? Armenia’s is a very professional force,” she says. Eventually, Cornell envisions that Nagorno-Karabakh will remain, at least on the map, a sovereign part of Azerbaijan but will retain de facto independence. He says the outcome of Azerbaijan’s parliamentary elections should have little effect on negotiations over Nagorno-Karabakh. Bilateral talks are set to resume in December but no one expects a solution to the crisis anytime soon.

This publication is now archived. IntroductionAzerbaijanis go to the polls November 6 to vote in parliamentary elections that experts fear will be neither free nor fair. Authorities in recent weeks have clamped down on dissent, muzzled the media, and detained opposition leaders. A wave of recent pro-democracy rallies has resulted in police beatings and arrests. Some say the violence has been provoked, in part, by government fears of an Azerbaijani version of the so-called color revolutions that occurred in nearby Georgia and Ukraine. Others say Azerbaijan’s current strongman, Ilham Aliyev, is asserting greater control now that his country is awash in petrodollars. Meanwhile, the elections have put the United States, an ally of Azerbaijan, in a tough bind: How to deal with a strategically important, energy-rich ally while espousing freedom and democracy in the region? Azerbaijan’s semi-authoritarianismAzerbaijan has had a turbulent time since gaining independence in 1991. Mostly made up of secular Shiite Muslims, the country has been plagued, like many post-Soviet states, by rampant corruption, slow growth, and double-digit inflation. Today it is still far from democratic. Aliyev—who in 2003 succeeded his ailing father Heydar Aliyev—has hardly been the reformer many in the West hoped for. He has run a campaign of intimidation against the press and opposition. In the run-up to this year’s election, the president has authorized the use of force to break up public protests, prohibited rallies in Baku’s Azadliq (Freedom) Square, and forced government employees to attend rallies of pro-government candidates. He has prevented one of the opposition’s main leaders, Rasul Guliyev, exiled for the past nine years abroad, from reentering the country. He has also purged several of his cabinet ministers, including Ali Insanov, a former health minister and one of Azerbaijan’s most powerful—and richest—politicians, for allegedly financing the opposition.   Meet the oppositionMore than 2,000 candidates are vying for 125 parliamentary seats. To date, the opposition has been disorganized, undisciplined, and fraught with political infighting, experts say. Unlike in Georgia or Ukraine, there is no single leader who enjoys the backing of the opposition’s various strands. This lack of unity has muddled their message: “If you ask the voters what [the opposition] stands for, people won’t be able to tell them,” says Svante Cornell, deputy director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies. Complicating matters, some opposition leaders held positions of power briefly after the breakup of the Soviet Union, a chaotic time remembered for its war and economic collapse. “Voters link these leaders with bad memories,” says Elizabeth Fuller, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty expert on the Caucasus. “For young voters, these are yesterday’s men. They will vote for the status quo because they don’t want things to get worse.” Still, there are some signs the opposition may be gaining in strength. Earlier this year, Azerbaijan’s three main opposition parties banded together to form a united bloc, Azadliq (Freedom). The bloc, in a nod to Ukraine, has adopted “orange” as its official color and launched a number of well-attended rallies in recent months, many of them ending in violence and arrests. Indeed, Azadliq has drawn some criticism from opposition leaders outside the bloc for holding unauthorized rallies in addition to failing to get out the vote through door-to-door campaigning. The bloc is fielding 125 candidates, but polls show its support is only around 15 percent.Azerbaijan’s opposition parties are dominated less by platforms than by personalities. The three parties comprising Azadliq are: Azerbaijan Popular Front Party. “The granddaddy of them all,” Fuller says, the Popular Front Party (PFA) emerged in 1989 in response to the outbreak of the Armenian-Azeri ethnic conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. Its young and charismatic leader, Ali Kerimli, forty, has led the reform wing of the party since the early 1990s and, perhaps more than any figure today in Azerbaijani politics, has tried to unite the opposition. The party’s platform, Cornell says, “is closer to the U.S. Democratic Party, not the Social Democrats in the European sense, in that it favors a bigger role for the state.” In the 2000 legislative elections, the PFA won 11 percent of the vote and six out of 125 parliamentary seats.Democratic Party of Azerbaijan.The Democratic Party of Azerbaijan (ADP) is a splinter group of the party in power, the New Azerbaijan Party. Its founder, Rasul Guliyev, is a former ally of Heydar Aliyev’s and speaker of parliament. A fugitive since 1996, Guliyev, fifty-seven, is wanted on six charges, including embezzlement of $117 million in oil revenues. He was apprehended in Ukraine on October 17, as were several of his party members who were planning to protest their leader’s detention. ADP members say the charges are politically motivated, though experts say Guliyev has a dubious past. “He was head of the largest oil refinery [in Azerbaijan],” Fuller says. “Shall we say he had ample possibility to divert certain funds if he so chose.” Mosabat.The party ofBaku’s intelligentsia, secular and nationalistic, Mosabat (Equality) claims to be the successor to Azerbaijan’s pre-Soviet ruling party from 1918-20. “This gives it a stability the other parties don’t have,” Cornell says. The party is run by Isa Gambar, forty-eight, an historian and longtime figure in Azerbaijani politics. He is a founding member of the PFA who split with the party in 1992. Some experts consider him the heir to Abulfaz Elchibey, Azerbaijan’s first elected president who assumed power in 1992 only to be overthrown one year later by Heydar Aliyev. “Of the opposition, Gambar has leadership abilities and some popular following,” says Peter Sinnot, lecturer at Columbia University and expert on Central Asia. An economy clouded by corruption Despite its abundance of oil, Azerbaijan remains an economic backwater. Forty percent of the country’s population is mired in poverty, earning less than $41.20 per month. The country ranks 101st out of 177 countries in the United Nations’ 2005 Human Development Index. Corruption runs rampant: Outside of its oil sector, the investment community is rife with graft; bribes to government officials are commonplace; and the state holds monopolies over half of the economy, including the oil firm Socar and Azal airlines, and is often accused of blocking outside entrants to the market. It is little coincidence that nine of the ten wealthiest Azerbaijanis work in government, according to the Baku-based newsmagazine Hesabat. Yet polls show that Azerbaijanis are hopeful Aliyev can pull his country out of poverty, despite their economic problems. A survey in June sponsored by the International Republican Institute showed 56 percent of the population felt the country was heading in the right direction. According to the Wall Street Journal, Azerbaijan’s economy is expected to grow by 18 percent this year and 25 percent in 2006. Nearly all of that growth is due to oil: A new, 1,100-mile British Petroleum-led pipeline linking Baku to Ceyhan, Turkey began operation in May and will eventually carry up to one million barrels of oil per day from the Caspian to the Mediterranean, through Georgia. A century ago, Azerbaijan supplied nearly half of the world’s oil. Today, oil comprises 80 percent of Azeri exports and two-thirds of all investments in the country. U.S.-Azeri relations: Strained but still strongAzerbaijan has been a key regional ally to the United States in the war on terrorism. One of the most symbolic recent developments was the March 2002 lifting of Section 907, a U.S. ban on development aid to Azerbaijan that stretched back to 1992. Experts say the ban, put in place after war broke out between Azerbaijan and Armenia, was engineered in part by Armenia’s powerful U.S.-based diaspora. The restriction was lifted after Baku offered air-rights access and intelligence to the U.S. military in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Relations between Baku and Washington were improved after Azerbaijan sent 150 soldiers to Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.  Yet as democracy continues its downward slide in Azerbaijan, Washington finds itself in a delicate spot. Experts say Azerbaijan is important to Washington because its large oil reserves—the bulk of which will be consumed by Europe , not the United Stats—will help stabilize global energy prices and is an important strategic ally in the region. For instance, there has been some talk—particularly in light of Uzbekistan’s recent decision to eject U.S. forces from its K-2 Airbase—of staging a U.S. military presence in Nasosnaya, an airfield not far from Baku, as well as installing two radars in the country to prevent the smuggling of weapons of mass destruction through what is considered a major black-market corridor.The United States, as well as the Council of Europe, has stepped up pressure on Baku to adopt a number of election reforms. In late October, Azerbaijan’s parliament agreed to allow foreign-funded, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) monitor the polls, granted more television time to opposition candidates, and approved the use of indelible ink to mark voters’ fingers. Still, not every expert is convinced the government is sincere about electoral reform. “We’re going to see elections where the ballot box is legitimate, but everything else is suspect,” Sinnot says. Azerbaijan’s long road aheadAzerbaijan, given its location and large oil reserves, is a country of growing geopolitical importance. While its government is semi-authoritarian, experts say it is not completely lost to anti-democratic forces. There is an opposition present, however disorganized. There are a growing number of civil-society groups. Plus, as investors continue to flock to the country, experts say transparency and the rule of law will improve. Not to mention that Azerbaijan can provide the Shiite Muslim world with a functioning if flawed democracy. While the ruling party is expected to easily maintain its majority in Sunday’s election, it is the electoral process, not the outcome, that may be more important, experts say. Azerbaijan’s government needs to prove it is serious about securing its legitimacy through free and fair democratic elections. Only then, experts say, can the country emerge from its economic doldrums and become a democratic model for the rest of the region.